The yearly KDE World Summit, Akademy, has found a home for 2006 on the emerald isle. This year,
the multi-day event for contributors to the leading Free Desktop
will be held from September 23nd
to 30th 2006 in beautiful Dublin, capital city of
Ireland. Our hosts will be Ireland's oldest university, Trinity College. There are three sub-events: a contributors
conference, the KDE e.V. annual general assembly and a week long hacking session that offers the opportunity to
discuss all sorts of things face-to-face.
We also look forward to the chance to
mingle with local KDE enthusiasts.

"We are looking forward to meeting and sharing ideas with so many
developers of quality Free Software from the KDE community"
says Glenn Strong, Trinity College Computer Science Lecturer and Chairman of the Irish Free Software Organisation.

This year, based on a popular vote by the KDE e.V.'s members, Akademy will
be hosted by Trinity College Dublin, one of Dublin's four
universities. A team led by Marcus Furlong will
organise the conference. From September 23nd
to 30th 2006, KDE enthusiasts from around the world will converge to share
experiences, code and perhaps ale.

"The School of Computer Science and Statistics at Trinity College is
pleased to welcome the KDE Akademy conference to Dublin this year, and
hopes the event will be constructive for all KDE contributors, and
that everyone enjoys and benefits from their stay in Dublin" said
Dr. David Abrahamson, Head of the School of Computer Science and
Statistics, Trinity College.

A formal call for papers will be put up in due time, but you may wish to
start thinking of posters, position papers, experiences and case studies to
write up for the (peer reviewed) conference part of Akademy. For the
hacking sessions, figure out who you need some quality face-to-face time
with and convince them to come too!

Oddly enough, I'll agree. It was begun primarily, instead of a way to help get KDE legal, to replace KDE with a nearly completely incompatible desktop. Nowadays its primary purpose seems to be the proprietary-software-friendly desktop. Another wrinkle is the attention and excitement paid to Mono, which may or may not have legal problems, depending on who you ask. And unlike KDE, the GNOME project doesn't seem to want to play nice. With anyone.

I admire GNOME for their work on usability and for much of their work in becoming friendly in other areas, but big jeers for not playing nice and for all the code duplication.

He's a enthusiast KDE user, and contributes to KDE by taking a shitload of work on him. Organising aKademy is a lot of work and we're more than happy to have the local team supporting KDE in this very unique way. I'm looking forward to aKademy 2006.

And btw, Marcus is a nice guy and until now, he's excellent to work with.

OK -- I didn't know who Marcus was either, but obviously he is contributing in a major, major way just by organising this conference. So it is more than a little bit rude to imply that he is a "joke" IMHO.

but the story was published; his name is linked to a website; such a link commonly suggests to the innocent reader that one can find more info about the person there; but that linked website is basically empty; so that link can only be seen as a kind of joke -- otherwise you wouldn't include it at all in the story.

Better introduce myself properly, my college webpage is automagically
generated and I've never used it as you might have guessed. I am a
postgraduate student in Trinity College and a long-time KDE user. I've
been using KDE since KDE 1 and I am an active advocate (the usual
suspects; family, friends and anywhere I have worked). I'm also going
to be updating the KDE Ireland website, as Barry has been quite busy
over the last few months.

While I have not been involved in KDE development, I am currently
doing research on metadata generation and retrieval and the hope is to
develop a prototype KDE frontend based on this work. What I'm doing is
similar to DBFS (http://ozy.student.utwente.nl/projects/dbfs/) without
the SQL part, as we hope to store the keywords at the filesystem
level. This probably all falls under the scope of the Tenor project,
but at the moment I am evaluating and experimenting with different
algorithms, so desktop integration comes later.

About Trinity itself, around the CS department in college there are
plenty of machines that run KDE, both staff and students. We have a
lot a Unix machines in all the CS labs and most of the students run
KDE in any of the classes that I am assistant in. The local aKademy
organising team consists of a lot of people who are interested in free
software in general and while I don't think any of them develop for
KDE (although there is one guy who gets his students to use QT for his
C++ class), many of them are also happy users and are ready to help
out in any way possible. Also, there are members of the IFSO who are
staff in Trinity and they are delighted that we are hosting the
conference.

So apologies for the blank webpage, I'll get around to updating it one of
these days. And welcome to everyone who will be in Dublin for aKademy 2006,
I can't wait to meet so many KDE contributors and I'm sure we'll have a
great time and help make KDE even better than it is now!

Thank you for welcoming everyone to Ireland. I think this upcoming conference will be a real turning point for KDE and the free desktop and I understand and appreciate all the hard work that you will have to put in to organize an event as complex as a KDE conference.

So thank you for making it happen and pass on our appreciation to the staff and faculty of Trinity College.